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City restaurateurs — some of them, anyway — are disenchanted with the proliferation and popularity of food carts, those Meals on Wheels for foodies. The restaurateurs claim the carts are eating into their profits. They say the carts have an unfair advantage because they haven’t the overhead restaurants do and they don’t pay property taxes.

So they want a moratorium on them. The head of the B.C. Restaurant and Foodservices Association, Ian Tostenson, demanded that Vancouver city council stop its plans over the next two years to issue up to 30 more food-cart permits — augmenting the hundred or so carts already in operation.

He said Vancouver needs a “reality check” before allowing more food carts, and points to 16 restaurants along Granville Street that claim their profits have fallen six to 10 per cent since the arrival of the carts on the street in 2010. (If the quality of food, service or ambience were factors in the decline of any of those restaurants, Tostenson, as far as I know, did not say.)

The BCRFA found a champion in Non-Partisan Association Coun. George Affleck, a small-business owner himself. After meeting with a group of those restaurateurs, Affleck announced his intention to table a motion asking city staff to consider changes to the food cart program that might ease the restaurateurs’ concerns — by which I take it to mean their bottom lines.

“I know this is going to be seen as an anti-food-cart motion,” Affleck protested, “but that’s not what it is.

“I live downtown, so I like the food carts. They’re great. But I don’t want to lose one identity (restaurants) at the expense of another (food carts). This motion isn’t about solutions yet, it’s about how we might better accommodate both restaurants and food carts.”

In this food fight, oddly, it’s the leftish wheat-growing bike-pedallers of Vision Vancouver that have been standing up for unbridled capitalism. Coun. Heather Deal, who’s been handling the issue for Vision, has said the city has no plans to stop issuing permits, while reminding the restaurateurs that this is a free-market system.

How well I know that. Newspapers operate in a free-market system, but as I recall, not a single politician stepped forward to call for the regulation of, or a moratorium on, the Internet — the proliferation and popularity of which may cause the death of my industry.

What do we hear instead?

Adapt or die. Innovate or perish. Good riddance to the mainstream media, and, oh ya, we’re going to reprint your articles on our website without paying for them.

That was our “reality check,” to quote Tostenson, and newspapers have had to tread water mightily just to keep afloat.

The Internet is here to stay, and newspapers will have to learn how to live with it or perish.

But enough about me.

In Portland, Ore., which has 700 licensed food carts — about 400 of which are open for business on any given day — restaurants and food carts have learned how to live together.

“Surprisingly,” said Brett Burmeister, managing editor of the Food Carts Portland website, “there’s been very little push-back from restaurants. The issue is more that they’re competing for a different dollar than food carts.”

Restaurateurs also understand, Burmeister said, that food carts could even augment their business. The carts themselves have become a tourist draw, and when food-cart-loving foodies come to check them out — as many Vancouverites do, Burmeister said, because he’s met many of them — they invariably spend money in the local bars, hotels and restaurants. It was, he said, “an enlightened, entrepreneurial approach.”

Portland has a somewhat different approach to the mobility of food carts — they cluster in the dozens on empty lots, where they become, in effect, stationary. But those clusters can be right in the heart of the downtown, such as the one at 10th and Alder, where about 60 food carts serve everything from banh mi to foie gras. I’ve eaten there myself.

Maybe our city council could look at something like that as a sop to the downtown restaurateurs, though I’d bet they’d balk at even that.

But you don’t stop or limit the licensing of food carts just because restaurateurs don’t like the competition.

The landscape and the market have changed, and sorry, if you can’t make a meal of it, it’s time to move on.

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